Today you’ll get advice from an examiner for your IELTS essays.
In 14 years of examining, Jessica can tell you she gave a lot of 6’s.
An overall rule for your writing, is don’t make the examiner work too hard!
The examiner should be able to understand what you mean right away. Don’t ask him/her, as a reader, to make inferences.
In only 40 minutes, 250 words, you’re not expected to have very complicated ideas. That’s not what you’re graded on.
Be direct and obvious in your ideas.
Basically, if the examiner has to stop reading your essay and go back to read something again, that will lower your score.
It could be a problem with the logic of your ideas, or the way you’re expressing yourself through vocabulary and sentence structure.
When you brainstorm, write down the first ideas you think of. Then, use a lot of transition phrases to link all of your ideas. (The templates in 3 Keys IELTS teaches you how to do this.)
Also, do not make your essay super long. You don’t get any more points.
If you have over 300 words, usually your ideas get muddled, and you’ll make more mistakes.
Even though the examiner doesn’t count your words any more, you still have at least 150 words for Task 1 and 250 words for Task 2 to get a 7 or higher.
Next, you are graded on exactly the same things, regardless of what type of essay you’re writing.
This means that for a 7+ in Task, you must express your position, even in a Problem Solution essay.
You can say, ‘To my mind, I believe the best way to ameliorate this problem…‘
Don’t try to include too many fancy, complicated words. Don’t reach too far and take risks, or you make mistakes and your vocabulary score goes down.
You want to learn impressive academic vocabulary that can be applied to many different topics.
Lastly, you don’t have to have really long complex sentences for a higher grammar score.
If you want a 7+ for Grammar, you just need a mix of sentence structures and few mistakes– some complex, compound and simple sentences.
What questions do you have for our ex-IELTS examiner?
Ask her in the comments section below!
